Why am I a fan of the Azzurri? If you were a gay man or a straight woman, you probably wouldn’t need any further explanation: we love them for precisely the same reason why the French hate them. Each performance of the eleven young men handpicked by their manager is a pure exquisite sexual fantasy “corporealised” on your TV screen (Dolce & Gabbana was very open about it as they capitalised on their World Cup championship in 2006 with ads featuring all the lads in their national “briefs”).

My “Italian connection” in football went back to 1994. I spent my summer in Hong Kong with my insomniac family, and my father and I spent the wee hours in front of the television watching the World Cup USA. Of course, Hong Kong has a “national” team; but our dream of being qualified in the World Cup only lasted briefly in 1985, when our team beat the PRC team in their final qualifying match (the famous “5.19 Incident” that has “eternally traumatised China”). As a result, the PRC team has considered us as their rival and vice versa. Before the Premier League became a global phenomenon as it is, “England” and its fandom, who always basked themselves in the glory back in 1966, were never taken seriously by their not-quite-faithful colonial subjects (us). Hence, the city is usually divided into two camps: Brazil and Italy. If you like entertaining football, you would become a Brazilian for a few weeks during the tournament; if you wouldn’t mind watching ninety minutes of defence and hoping that the Italians would get their job done in the good old European fashion, you would wear your blue jersey and learn how to chant “Italia! Italia!” in perfect Italian.
“Nationals” of football “powers” like England, France, Italy and Brazil, especially with some of their colonial pasts, know very well that their “national” teams are always marketable global commodities, that they all have their international followings. The question is: Are “we” (the international following) “real” or “bandwagoners?” Watching a football match of England in Nevada Smiths (the Mecca of European football in New York City) is like seeing the British Empire reconvening in an American Irish pub, and a performance of Les Bleus on the TV screens there would remind you that France used to own more than half of Africa (and in a way, it still does). In World Cup 2002 (Japan/S. Korea), Juventus fans of Japanese descent overwhelmed the cameras with their chants for Alex Del Piero, whose passion graced some newspaper pages in Japan about what they called petit nationalisme. Are “traditional” labels such as “colonisers,” “subalterns,” and “global consumers” applicable as “authenticity tests?”

Watching games in public spaces are always a matter of passing these “authenticity tests,” and the lines that demarcate the differences between “colonisers,” “subalterns,” and “global consumers” are far from simply biologically, linguistically or historically predetermined. For example, my favourite Italian pizza restaurant, No. 28, whose owners have known me as an “Italian fan” for seven years, always reserved for me and my friends the best seats in front of the TV screens, until the day of the World Cup Final in 2006 on which they decided that I was not “Italian enough.” During the last England game in the same tournament, I happened to stand in front of a group of fellow East Asians (some of my friends included) in Nevada Smiths. I was in my “Three Lions” jersey and digging out all the “authentic curses” from my days in England to “show off” my “Englishness”; at the same time, we all sing together “England Till I Die.” During half-time, the lad in front of me turned around and asked, “What are these Asians doing here?” Instinctively, I answered, “We are all England’s supporters.” The lad said, “You are one of us, but I don’t know about them.”
How about “China?” My friend Alex and I (Alex is also from Hong Kong, who is much younger than me) both consider ourselves as “authentic” “Italian” fans. In 2002, when the PRC was qualified for the World Cup for the first time, we thought, “Can you imagine yourself standing in Nevada Smiths singing ‘March of the Volunteers?’” For us, watching eleven blond Chinese teenagers (of course, seeing Chinese teenagers being “blond” generated a series of articles on newspapers during that tournament, another field of “authenticity” to plough) defending “their nation” was a matter of indifference and shame. We were indifferent, because for ninety minutes, “China” was “their nation” as long as the team stayed in the pitch. We were shameful, because we were quite educated by our secondary-school history textbooks (authenticated by Qian Mu, of course) to see this game as an instantiation of “China” and its “history”: a “disintegrated nation” “humped” by the “world powers.”

Perhaps not everyone understands this gliding, shifting, and highly unstable thing called “football nationality.” Watching these games, one slips from “acting as” a fan of an “alien” country to “being” a fan of “my” country, and vice versa, a process that keeps helping us load and unload, configure and reconfigure what doesn’t quite “work” in our consciousness of history and being in the world, and for that matter, our sense of inclusion and exclusion in the world that marches on in time (a scenario in which “China” never quite fits even “in” a football match).

On Sunday the 22nd, after Italy’s defeat by the Spaniards in the Euro 2008 tournament, Alex and I sat down in Nevada Smiths to wait for the thunderstorm to pass. Two drunken Spaniards approached me. They assumed that I was a “bandwagoner” who donned the Italian jersey in order to be basked in their World Cup glory. One of them said, “Look at these Asians, you will see them this Thursday wearing our red shirts supporting us.” Later on, at dinner, Alex and I talked about how humiliated we felt, because we considered ourselves as “real Italians.” By the time we got the check, Alex asked me, “Which team would you support next?” I said to him, “For me, the tournament is over. Italy is gone and England was never qualified.” Alex thought for a few seconds; he then said, “I will support the Spaniards.” At that time, I was flabbergasted by his reaction. Nevertheless, as I went home, I finally realised, perhaps I am the person who has failed to understand the true meaning of the shiftable notion between “acting as” and “being.” Let those people have migraine over their “real nations,” we never have one, and we never care to have one. It is in this total disintegration of the political community that Gramsci’s ideal is realised: “Football is the open-air kingdom of human loyalty.”